Marx Brothers: BFI Celebrate the Evergreen Appeal

'They were as surrealist as Dali, as shocking as Stravinsky, as verbally outrageous as Gertrude Stein, as alienated as Kafka,' opined Roger Ebert. Watching them today, with the benefit of decades of films that bear their influence, it’s difficult to appreciate just how out there the films of the Marx Brothers must have seemed to their first audiences. Having cut their teeth on the stage, the quartet progressed to the screen just as sound was entering cinema; there they honed a comic style that was at once strikingly modern and deeply rooted in vaudeville tradition, as much a creation of the talkies as Buster Keaton was a child of the silent era.

The brothers forged their personas in their early theatre days: Groucho the moustachioed wit; Chico the womanising dimwit; Harpo the musical mime; Zeppo, always the butt of the joke. But far from being confined by their characters, they used them as springboards to develop their freakish, almost Dadaist humour. Attempting to describe Duck Soup or A Night at the Opera in terms of plot won’t get you far – their pictures are powered not by narrative, but by a delirious hybrid comedy of satire, slapstick, absurdism, music and wordplay.

Formed in one age of recession and political turmoil, the comedy of the Marx Brothers is being resurrected by the BFI for another. This season covers eight of their finest features, ranging from their early Paramount days to their post-Zeppo incarnation for MGM. Yet economic parallels aside, the Marx Brothers have remained relevant since their heyday in the interwar years: Woody Allen cited them as a reason not to commit suicide, Queen named two albums after their films, and cult comedy shows such as South Park continue to channel their anarchic spirit. Not to be missed.